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The Future of Emails

Ideas behind the Odoo communication tools.

Emails make me waste my time. But I need them.
Given the importance that emails have in our lives,
it's incredible it's still one of the only software
areas that did not evolve in the past 20 years!

Reading my inbox is the most unproductive task I do
on a daily basis. I have to spend one full hour a
day to process my emails. All the junk flows in the
same inbox; spams, information that doesn't matter,
quoted answers of quoted answers, etc. At the end
of the hour, only 10 emails actually requested an
answer from me. With a good tool, I could have done
my job in 10 minutes!

At Odoo, we build tools to bring productivity to
enterprises. As emails and information flows are one of
the biggest wastes of time in companies, we have to fix
this.

To disrupt emails, you need more than just another user
interface. We need to rethink the whole communication flow.

The Communication Mechanism of Odoo

Here are the ideas behind the Odoo communication tools:

Get Things Done: your inbox is a
todo list. You should be able to process (not only
read) the inbox and easily mark messages for future
actions. Every inbox should be empty after having
been processed; no more overload of information.

Keep control of what you want to receive or don't want
to receive. People should never receive spam. You
should follow/unfollow any kind of information in one
click.

Productivity is key: our smart user
interface does not require you to click on every mail
to read a thread. Reading a full thread, replying,
attaching documents is super fast.

A mix of push & pull: Today, people
are victims of what others decide to push to them.
Odoo differentiates:

Messages "for information":
you can pull them when you need some specific
information; they are not required to be read
every day.You receive only what you decided
to follow.This accounts for 90% of your daily
emails.Use the "Inbox" menu for these.

Messages "for action": they
require your immediate attention and you need
to process them all. This accounts for 10%
of your daily emails. Use the "To: me" menu
for these.

Focus on the Content: Everything is
stripped to emphasize on the real message. No more
welcome introductions, greetings, signatures and legal
notes.We standardize the layout of each message.
(signatures are on the profile of a contact, not in
every message)

Folders and mailing lists are great tools but too
complex in traditional email clients. In Odoo, a
group of contacts that share a discussion can be
created with one click. Every group should have it's
own email address.